Word: priestess
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...technology of the 20th century or that of the Stone Age. While some insurgents fought government troops with Kalashnikov rifles, many others went into battle bare chested and armed with nothing more than sticks and rocks. These warriors were following the orders of a 27-year-old self-styled "priestess" known as Mama Alice, who was trying to overthrow the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni with an odd mixture of Christian theology and African witchcraft. Believers in her Holy Spirit Movement, she told followers, could ward off enemy bullets by coating themselves with the oil of a local tree...
...like a hairy sunflower. He minded the way she filled her teacup one finger over the rim to watch the level, and he minded the way she talked to herself perpetually, going about the house with her lips moving as though she were some kind of old-fashioned priestess forever at her praying, or insane. Also, she whined. But Clumly was not bitter. 'Nobody' life is perfect,' he sometimes said to himself, which was true...
...priestess Salammbo danced to the seductive warbling of a flute, her long white dress slowly fell to the ground, and she stood naked before the sacred python. Taking the serpent in her arms, she "wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees . . . Salammbo gasped beneath this weight . . . her back bent, she felt she was dying; and with the tip of its tail it gently flicked her thigh...
...Bram Dijkstra, an erudite and passionately indignant professor of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, the only answer is c. In case anyone thinks he is making too much of Salammbo's gyrations, Dijkstra wants us to know that a painting of the priestess by Charles Allen Winter was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898 and a sculpted version by Jean-Antoine-Marie Idrac won a place of honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was, in other words, a scene that appealed all too strongly to the roving Victorian...
...misunderstanding and misogyny reach such deplorable heights? Dijkstra offers conflicting scapegoats. One is the rise of industrial capitalism, which made such physical and moral demands that men fled, exhausted, to the image of woman as "priestess of virtuous inanity." The other, which explains the failure of such canonization, is the spread of Darwinism and the quack argument that women remained at a more primitive stage of evolution. As Darwin himself put it, "Man has ultimately become superior to woman...